The Second SFC Demonstration
Here are some more big pics that show some early demonstrations of the
Super Famicom's power. These pictures appeared in the September 1, 1989
issue of Famicom Tsushin. These images come from a press meeting on July
28, 1989, a mere 16 months before the Super Famicom went on sale.
These are quite amazing for their history! Some quick info from the pictures:
The headline of the article says "Super Famicom will not be released
for at least another year!" The second image shows an older SFC design,
with A,B,Y,X buttons, but in a different arrangement. Start and Select are
also in a different orientation. The right side of the page shows the "mode
7" demo, scroll demo, sprite demo, colour, mosaic demo, and "sound"
as the captions say.
The next pages have some great images of an early Super Mario World, and
what turned into Pilotwings. I don't know about you, but I think a game
where you play a dragonfly with guns and missiles would have been much more
fun than a straight flight simulator...
And now, for those of you following at home, here is a timeline of the Super Famicom's progress as followed (rumoured?) by the Japanese press:
| Date |
Publication |
Contents |
| 9/9/1987 |
Kyoto
Shinbun |
"16-bit
Super Famicom. Compatible with the Famicom" |
| 9/15/1987 |
Yomiuri
Shinbun |
"Software/Games
are already under development. Price set at under ¥20,000." |
| 11/23/1987 |
B-Young
Age |
"Old
Family Computer is taken as a trade-in." |
| 1/18/1988 |
Nikkei
Computer |
"The
CPU will be 65C816. Improved graphics & sound." |
| Jan.
1988 |
A
Club (Hong Kong) |
"The
system will accept 2 types of disks, cartridges." (This
seems to be pure conjecture.) |
| Jun.
1988 |
Sendenkaigi
(Advertisement meeting) |
"Development
is going smoothly." |
| 7/29/1988 |
Famicom
Tsushin |
"Super
Famicom will come out within the year!?" |
| 12/23/1988 |
Famicom
Tsushin |
"Super
Famicom is finally demonstrated. Release planned for July 1989." |
7/28/1989 |
Nintendo
trade meeting |
"Super
Famicom will not be released for at least another year!" |
| ... |
... |
... |
| 11/21/1990 |
Super
Famicom is -- finally -- released! |
Here are some variations of the early Super Famicom Hardware.
(Click on the left pic for a larger version)
These pics were taken from "Family Computer Magazine", the main rival
to Famitsu, in their August 18, 1989 issue. The pics are from the same show
that Famitsu attended, obviously, but they have much larger pictures and close-ups
of the SFC hardware. Even though the SFC would go through a few cosmetic changes,
it is clear to me now that the hardware was basically finished by mid-1989,
and that Nintendo sat on the SFC for over a year. They probably did this to
let other software developers finish their games, but another reason was that
the 8-bit Famicom was still selling like wildfire, and so they feared releasing
the SFC too early would have killed hardware sales of a still-successful system.
(Bah, at the very least, they could have spent that year upgrading the CPU speed!)
 (Click on image for a close-up) |
Here are the technical specs of the prototype SFC, circa mid-1989...
So it looks like the SFC was pretty much shippable then. The only big differences I can see between these specs and that of the released version is much less main RAM. The release SFC has 128Kbytes of RAM, a very large increase. Most games don't use such a whopping amount of RAM, except for SlowROM games to run their code in at 3.58Mhz. So, perhaps Nintendo added the RAM in to get that speed boost. Hmm... 2048 colours at once in the BG???!?!? (A technically-savvy friend has pointed out that this is the SFC's "direct colour mode" which displays 256-colour tiles, but with a lower single bit of colour selectable from the palette memory (256x8) for each tile. In other words, a mostly useless colour mode.) |
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This is the first time I've ever seen the old title screen to Super Mario World!
Well, it's good that they changed it, since this seriously lacks colours...
I can count maybe just 10 colours or so. It does have a nice Japanese "parchment"
feel to it. It's interesting to note that the island in the title screen is
the same as the "world" that you walk on in the map. It's an interesting
mushroom-shaped world, though it's disappointingly small for a world
if you ask me.
Below are some more pics of an early Super Mario World. It looked very much like a 16-bit version of SMB3 back then, what with the note blocks, coins, square question blocks, and raccoon-Mario power-up. No sign of Yoshi whatsoever.
These pics, and the ones that appeared in other magazines, are usually identical. That means that Nintendo probably distributed slides or photographs to various magazines at the time. Only some of the images taken by magazines at the SFC show were from live video (or more likely videotape, given their blurriness.)
Here's an early title screen (?) of Dragonfly, what would become
Pilotwings. Pretty boring, but I like the look of that '0' in the title... a
level select, perhaps?
What the hell is this??? A hoax!
| EARLIER |
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